By Paul Kengor
Monday, April 08, 2013
Margaret Thatcher, one of the greatest leaders of the
Cold War, of the 20th century, and of British history, has died at the age of
87.
I’ve referred to her as one of my Cold War seven: Ronald
Reagan, John Paul II, Mikhail Gorbachev, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Boris
Yeltsin, and Margaret Thatcher. They were the seven figures who dissolved an
Evil Empire, and only Walesa and Gorbachev still remain with us.
The world dubbed her the Iron Lady, a title that duly
fits. Many, however, mistake the Iron Lady moniker as referring solely to her
strength in the Cold War. There was much more to it. Consider:
Margaret Thatcher is arguably the most complete British
leader of the last 100 years, surpassing even Winston Churchill. Like
Churchill, she was tough and successful in foreign policy, taking on and
vanquishing totalitarian evil. Churchill warned the world as the Iron Curtain
descended across Europe. Decades later, the world celebrated as the Iron Lady
helped break the Iron Curtain.
But unlike Churchill, Margaret Thatcher had enormous
domestic successes that Churchill couldn’t touch, and didn’t dare try to touch.
When World War II closed, the British people booted Churchill from the prime
ministership in preference of Labour leader Clement Attlee, who gave the
British populace Keynesian socialism. The masses wanted their welfare state,
and Attlee, equipped with promises of “change” and “forward,” gave them a
fundamental transformation. In no time, Attlee’s party was spending money
unlike anything Britain had ever seen, nationalizing everything under the sun,
including with the progressive left’s coup de grace: government healthcare. It
was a giant government binge that would bury Britain for decades.
This fundamental transformation to welfare-statism was so
thorough, and so imbibed by the electorate, that when Churchill later returned
to office for another term (1951-55) the World War II hero couldn’t stand up to
the sacred cows of Britain’s new nanny state. By the late 1970s, the United
Kingdom was smothered not only by massive government expenditures and debt but
by the enormous and disastrous government unions that the Labour Party had
built and nurtured.
All of this came to a crashing head in the late 1970s,
and fittingly under the Labour Party, this time led by Prime Minister James
Callaghan. The signature event was the Winter of Discontent (1978-79). The
economy was an utter train wreck, debt-ridden and hampered by a prolonged
un-recovering “recovery.” Things were made far worse by continual work
stoppages by striking public-sector unions. Given that the government ran just
about everything, thanks to decades of the British left nationalizing
everything, there was garbage literally rotting in the streets and dead people
not being buried because of striking government refuse workers and
gravediggers.
Things got so bad that the British electorate was willing
to elect a bona fide conservative to run their government: Margaret Thatcher.
This was not some squishy moderate that we in the United States would have
called a Rockefeller Republican or (today) a RINO. This was the real McCoy; the
genuine article. Here was a new leader who actually understood and could
articulate what was wrong with Britain—and had the courage to do something
about it.
And so, Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first-ever female
prime minister, embarked upon an extraordinary run from 1979-90 that featured
three consecutive electoral victories, including the landslide that brought her
to power. She then proceeded to take on not just the Soviets abroad, but, at
home, the powerful government unions, the Keynesian spending, the bloated
cradle-to-grave welfare state, the punitive taxes, the burdensome regulations,
and decades of government nationalizations/seizures. As to the latter, Thatcher
began a comprehensive campaign of privatization that returned freedom,
solvency, and sanity to Britain.
It was an amazing performance. You can now expect a remarkable
outpouring of emotion and appreciation in Britain, much like what America saw
with the death of Ronald Reagan and what the world witnessed with the passing
of John Paul II, her two Cold War partners and kindred souls. And like her two
great Cold War allies, she fortunately lived to see the collapse of the Soviet
empire.
Lady Thatcher outlived both Reagan and John Paul II. Her
health, unfortunately, had been in decline for a long time. I recall that she
recorded a video eulogy for Reagan’s funeral rather than address the audience
live and directly. That was 2004, almost 10 years ago.
I also recall her parting words to Ronald Reagan: “Well
done, thy faithful servant.”
And now, we can second that tribute. Well done, Lady
Thatcher.
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